I sit and look at the picture of the Mars-scape that I downloaded from NASA with the same awe as I had when I downloaded it day before yesterday. Todays' picture of the memorial was a nice touch, and brings back some of the feelings I had last February (I live in the Dallas area, and heard the explosion).

What better memorial? A plaque on the first permanently occupied extra-planetary base, I guess, but this is definitely a close second.
I just hope that we (humans) can get out there to put some flowers around it someday.

shouldn't be anything. CO2 doesn't react with aluminum, at least at the low temperatures of Mars unless I'm mistaken. Dust might wear it down after a while but that should be a really long time since the low pressure winds won't hit it very hard.

I'm guessing that it will get dusty at most. They proably made it out of aluminum because it's light and plastic would probably degrade faster.

They proably made it out of aluminum because it's light and plastic would probably degrade faster.

Well, that, and the plaque is stamped on the back of the probe's high-gain antenna [nasa.gov]. Space & weight are at a steep premium on these probes, and there really isn't room to add an extra slab of metal for any non-scientific purpose, even if most people would find the gesture fitting.

By way of comparison, read about the Marsdial [slashdot.org] project [slashdot.org], which does basically the same thing: mount a "frivilous" device onto one of the key components of the rover, done in a way that there's substantially no additional hardware (extra mass to require fuel, additional parts to possibly break down, etc).

I first noticed these jack-o'-lantern faces [nasa.gov] on the propellant tanks of the cruise stage while taking a look at the craft with Celestia [shatters.net], and at first I was thinking it was just some humour on the part of the person creating the skin for Celestia. But then I saw the picture linked to above, and obviously it wasn't just the programmer having a lark. I haven't been able to find anything on the Web about who came up with the idea, and why, though. I've developed a pet theory of my own, which would be that they needed a certain amount of dark surface on the gold-foil-wrapped tanks to maintain the proper thermal balance, and decided to do something more catchy than just a big bulls-eye dot on them or something like that.

It's very interesting... Many many people at JPL knew all about this, however the information was not known to be secret until yesterday, when it was announced that there'd be a bit of "unvieling" of the disk.